


Family Dinner

by a_big_apple



Series: Benevolence [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Confrontations, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 15:06:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12368325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_big_apple/pseuds/a_big_apple
Summary: It's Taako's turn to host family dinner. Lucretia is still trying to make good with him, but he's been putting some pieces together and the picture is...not great.





	Family Dinner

Taako lowkey dreads hosting these family dinners. Yes, they’re fun, mostly. He cooks something amazing, or Lup cooks something amazing, or they cook together. His house at school and all of its bedrooms are filled with a rotating cast of people he has somehow been tricked into caring about, people who bring laughter and stories and booze and love with them. But he’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He’s in the kitchen washing dishes by hand, because Carey and Killian are talking about wedding planning, and normally he’d be all into that but it makes him feel squirmy when Kravitz is here. So he’s hiding in the kitchen trying not to think too much about vows and promises and how frighteningly much he loves his boyfriend, when the only person he’d like to think about even less comes into the room. Even over the sound of the water, he knows her step. He’s known it for a hundred years.

“Can I be of any help?” Lucretia asks. Taako scrubs at the blackened center of his second favorite pan.

“Nope.” There’s a pause. He can almost  _ feel _ her moving hesitantly closer, and he scrubs harder even as his hackles rise.

“You used to at least let me dry.”

He rinses the pan and props it in the dish rack, moving on to the pile of dinner plates. “You’re pushing your luck right now, Madame Director.”

“Yes. But I can’t not try, Taako.”

She’s actually standing next to him now at the long counter, by the pile of dirty dishes, placing herself where he has to see her out of the corner of his eye when he takes another plate to wash. “Sure you can. You have eleven years of prior experience.” He falls into a rhythm, with the plates. Concentric circles on the front. Concentric circles on the back. Rinse, place in rack, take the next plate. He matches his breathing to the circling of the sponge, so he can keep his voice low and even.

“We both know I was...extremely wrong,” she says after a long, aching minute. It sounds like the run up to an apology, so Taako ignores the admission. It’s nothing she hasn’t said already; it doesn’t make any difference. He’s nearing the bottom of the pile of plates. “I don’t think I ever properly thanked you. It was your idea that saved us, in the end.”

“Yeah, almost like I’m not an idiot after all.”

“I told you not to sell yourself short,” she replies, and there’s fondness in her voice. As if this is banter, and she can’t tell that Taako has gone ice cold with rage under the mild facade he puts on whenever he’s in the same room with her. Maybe she honestly can’t--he hardly knows himself anymore, why would she know him any better?

“I’ve been thinking about that. About how much easier it is to put the pieces together, when you actually have all the pieces to begin with.” He’s finished the plates now, and moves on to the silverware. “You must have recognized it, when we first showed up. You knew it was Lup’s.”

“The Umbrastaff?” she asks, and then sighs, slow and heavy. “Yes.”

He recites them, each bit of the jigsaw he’s been turning over and over in his head. “You knew it was Lup’s, and you knew what it could do. You knew Lup was a lich. You must have guessed that she’d died, when you saw me with it, and that she’d be incorporeal, and that she’d remember. You saw the power in the staff, in that ‘initiation test’ you put us through. You must have even seen Lup’s name burned into the cafeteria wall--I certainly didn’t bother to clean it up.”

She’s gone very still beside him. “Taako--”

“You’re smart, Lucretia, and you  _ had all the pieces _ . It took me about five minutes to figure it out, once I remembered everything. You had more than a year.”

“I...I suspected--”

“You  _ knew _ ,” Taako interrupts, and he’s stopped actually washing anything now, his hands are shaking too hard. The water just runs and runs, almost as loud as the rush of blood in his ears. “You knew that even if I didn’t remember her, Lup would remember me. She would remember  _ you _ , and she would know what you were planning. So you  _ left her in there _ .”

He’s waiting for the excuses, the apologies, even cold logic, but Lucretia doesn’t speak for a long while. She slumps a little further into his periphery, her stiff back curling. She doesn’t speak, so Taako finishes washing the silverware and shuts off the water, then turns to leave the kitchen. He’s almost to the door when he finally hears her, low and weary.

“I hoped she would protect you.”

_ I would rather have died for keeps than leave her trapped, _ he doesn’t say. He means it; but he isn’t a good person, and somewhere in the dark crevices of himself, he also thinks  _ she didn’t protect me from Sazed. She didn’t protect me from you.  _ It’s a glowing coal of anger in his chest, still too hot to touch.

“There’s another bottle of white in the fridge,” he says instead. “Bring it with you when you come back out.” And he steps through the swinging kitchen door, and leaves her there.


End file.
